Nonfiction.

Seeking Knowledge, Dodging Death

Jan Kott, Theater Scholar, And His Life In Poland Under Hitler And Stalin

June 12, 1994|By Reviewed by Nate Johnson, a writer and critic.

Still Alive: An Autobiographical Essay

By Jan Kott

Translated by Jadwiga Kosicka

Yale University Press, 291 pages, $30

Writing of the scene in "Richard III" where a messenger warns Lord Hastings to flee immediately or risk execution, Jan Kott once asked, "Who has not been awakened in this way at four a.m., at least once in his life?"

Few if any British or American literature professors could have posed the rhetorical question as confidently as Kott did 30 years ago in his controversial "Shakespeare Our Contemporary"-a book that inspired a generation of directors and critics. But this Polish theater scholar who came to the America in 1966, spent most of his career far from the protected environment of universities. Indeed, the events narrated in "Still Alive," Kott's new autobiography, are what made possible his startling question, which is typical of his highly personal approach to literature. Like many Poles who lived through both Hitler and Stalin, Kott had often heard the sort of 4 a.m. knock that woke Lord Hastings.

"Still Alive" begins with Kott's student years in Paris, and presents us with a veritable Who's Who of prewar European intellectual life. But it is the following three chapters, "The Occupation," "The Overcoat" and "Chronicle," relating his experience during and immediately after World War II, which form the true heart of the book.

Kott's acute sense of theater is at its best in these pages, which combine intellectual history with the action of a suspense novel. Occupied Poland was a dangerous place for Kott. He participated in the resistance movement of the Polish People's Army from 1942-45 and joined the underground Communist Party in 1943, when the penalty for membership was death.

Although his father had him baptized, both of Kott's parents came from Jewish families, and his wife, Lidia, was Jewish. In order to survive, they moved constantly from house to house and city to city, often narrowly escaping capture. Somehow, too, the prolific Kott found time to write his first book.

In one of many memorable incidents from this period, the future Yale and Berkeley professor avoided execution by posing as a doctor and delivering a baby at a Polish train station where German soldiers were conducting a punitive roundup. While others on the platform were sent to their deaths, Kott, whose knowledge of childbirth derived from a novel he had read, was assigned to a forced-labor camp as an obstetrician. Shortly afterward, he was released mistakenly when a German commander complained about the arrest of his chauffeur, named Kot.

Twice Kott was condemned to die by his own side. The first time, in the Polish People's Army, Kott fell asleep on watch and was spared execution when he was discovered to have a high fever that turned out to be a combination of malaria and typhus. Late in the war, Russian troops nearly hanged him as a spy because he was wearing a coat taken from a German railwayman. With the noose literally around his neck, Kott summoned up enough broken Russian to convey his real identity.

Kott, like Shakespeare, makes few distinctions between theater and life, applying the same critical eye to his own experience as he does to plays. In seeking to understand his own survival against a background of so much suffering and death, for example, Kott considers the outcome in dramatic terms:

"(I)n those rare cases where one succeeds in escaping from the trap, there is something of an unforeseeable coincidence that can be considered as either miraculous or absurd. . . . In the transposition of these situations from life . . . into dramatic genres, one sees clearly the mixture of high and low, pure and impure, pathetic and vulgar. . . . Happy endings, in this prevalence of misfortune, are somehow morally suspect."

This is the same clearheaded skepticism one finds in "Shakespeare Our Contemporary," which shares a mistrust of happy endings. Kott tells a revealing joke about English, French and Polish critics who are asked to speculate on who will restore order at the end of "King Lear." The English critic argues for the Duke of Albany, which is still one of the titles of an English monarch. The French critic insists on Edgar, the dutiful son. The Polish critic is convinced that order will not be restored.

Having participated in the communist resistance during the war, Kott was in an excellent position when a Soviet-sponsored government took over in Poland. For a while, he was an important party intellectual and university professor. Gradually, however, he grew disillusioned with the hypocrisy and deception of official communism ("My literary tastes . . . were always better than my political choices"), finally resigning from the party in 1957.